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José Ferreira, Director-Publisher |
Toronto, August 14th, 2010
Dear Friends,
After eight years online, it is truly gratifying to see that the Adiaspora.com project continues to be very popular among Luso users of the Internet. At this very moment, in which I am writing these few lines, the Adiaspora.com counter displays approximately 10,500,000 hits. This signifies that our ten thousand pages of virtual content continue to be relevant and pertinent among the peoples of the Lusitanian Diaspora. Always striving to serve better and more, the Adiaspora.com team now prepares itself for a new and exciting chapter in the history of our website.
Plans are afoot to redo the website in the very near future. Once more, it will be both graphically and technically refurbished, so as to allow greater accessibility to the online content contained in each rubric. We are also seeking to reactivate a sociolinguistic strategy, which was once implemented in the early phase of the website, namely, bilingualism, by translating the more impacting content into English. In so doing, it is expected the Adiaspora.com project will, in a progressive and sustainable manner, become increasingly more universal.
Throughout the ages, history has demonstrated that, among its many virtues, the Lusitanian people possess the ability to mobilize their creativity by improvising in more difficult times or situations.
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This phenomenon, which is unique to our people, is manifest individually or collectively, extricating us from the complex existential challenges we face every day. The socio-cultural and economic scenarios, brought about by the current global conjuncture, require that the Portuguese Diaspora draw from this common creative source to overcome the challenges we are faced with nowadays. To do so, it is essential we harness this collective talent sensibly and judiciously. By conjugating it with sustainable development policies and strategies, based on reinvention and innovation, we may then endeavour to consolidate the presence of the Portuguese in the world on all fronts, in these less propitious times. And it is precisely on reinvention and innovation that this new phase of the Adiaspora.com project is based, with plans to expand, in the very future, into the field of publishing, with the launching of Adiaspora Publications.
In the last few years, we have chosen to celebrate the anniversaries of our website in other Portuguese Communities, and in Portugal itself. The VIII Anniversary commemorations took place in October 2009, in East Providence, in the State of Rhode Island, USA. The seminar was a undeniably great success, having congregated a panel of illustrious speakers on a subject very pertinent to the peoples of the Portuguese Diaspora in the current global context: Reinvention and Innovation: Envisioning the Future in the Portuguese Diaspora.
In keeping with the policy of greater inclusiveness the Adiaspora.com project has come to adopt in recent years, by which it seeks to involve other Portuguese Communities in its activity, as well as encourage their proximity to the mother-land, the IX Anniversary commemorations of the website promoting Lusitanity, are scheduled to take place in the town of Lajes do Pico, Island of Pico, Azores, on October 23 and 24, 2010. The choice of this paradisiacal insular Portuguese territory to be the host of this year's cultural event is even more pertinent upon considering the fact that the peoples of this Island-Mountain, and those from the other Azorean islands and the Madeira Archipelago, have always been at the vanguard of the Portuguese migratory movement to the Americas and other parts of the globe.
The sharing of ideas and ideologies prevalent in the Lusitanian World is of utmost importance and essential to preserve the Portuguese sociolinguistic and cultural heritage in light of the mutability and hybridization inherent to any diasporic movement. With the theme Confluences of the Portuguese Spirit, the IX Adiaspora.com Anniversary in these Azorean lands, aims to converge the diverse and divergent vectors to be found in the Lusitanian tableau worldwide, by establishing intercommunity dialogue and exchange.
Finally, I wish to reassure you that the Adiaspora.com project will remain true to the mission decided upon when it was founded: that is, to promote Lusitanity in all the pluridimensionality in which it is manifest! The coverage and feedback resulting from these initiatives shall be the “compass” by which we orientate our mission to inform: laying down new guidelines, altering and adjusting our path whenever necessary or the Elysian winds of technological change dictate. The only thing permanent is our will to diffuse and promote Lusitanity and Lusophony to the very best of our ability.
To this end, we count on your support and encouragement as always.
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